This Bad Writing Habit Could Cost You Thousands Or More!
You can thank me and yourself later…
Take a second and imagine this. Your online writing side-gig is starting to take off. You are in the three, four, or even five-digit income-space per month just from saying what’s on your mind in text and maybe a few images. You’re talented, people love your writing, your parents, and friends are celebrating your success, and for the first time in a long time you feel you managed to turn your hobby into a budding primary or secondary career. It feels good, doesn’t it? I know, I feel that. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling that certainly puts a smile on my face almost daily.
Until… something happens. You suddenly find yourself unable to log in, your account appears suspended until further notice, or perhaps your articles have just gone missing. Panic sets in, and you know what? It should. It’s worse than being fired. It’s an instant cut-off from your income, be that primary or secondary, but regardless, it’s a tragedy. But a tragedy that to a large extent can be avoided.
But why would it happen in the first place?
There are multiple reasons why a platform might suddenly suspend one’s account. It can range from a genuine reason such as posting stuff against their terms and conditions, an honest mistake by some admin staff, or even a software glitch that overnight suspends a certain number of accounts. It’s nothing personal, it’s just wonky code. Happens more often than you think. The potentially good news is, that more often than not, a suspension is reversible, either by a platform fix, a manual toggle somewhere or you, deleting the offending content. When it all becomes a tad scarier, is all the other scenarios.
The first one is a massive data breach. I am a software developer, among other things, and data breaches happen all the time. Not to every company, but every company assumes by default that malicious actors (hackers!) are always out to target the more vulnerable ones. If you even for a second thought, ahh, well, your stories are on Medium or Substack or whichever of the other major ones you’re a writer on, you should be pretty safe, I would advise you stop being naive and scroll through haveibeenpwned.com’s comprehensive list of platforms and sites that have been hacked in the last few years. Just in case you’re super lazy to do that, here are some big names: LinkedIn, Avast, Comcast, Canva, Disqus, Adobe, Creative, Dropbox, Elance, Facebook, Ethereum, Epic Games, Forbes, Mastercard, Gravatar, Plex, Sony, Tesco, VK and many-many more. Every security expert will tell you that it’s not whether you will be affected by a breach, but rather when you will be affected, and when that happens you want to avoid being caught with your proverbial pants down.
The second one is an internal server error. You know when you see those 500 errors on Medium or other sites? Those are generally a sign that something on the platform end is going belly-up. Now, 99.9(9)% of the time it recovers easily, and with no data loss, but one cannot 100% guarantee anything in software. Unrecoverable data losses have happened in the past, not on Substack or Medium (as far as I’m aware), but they’re not unheard of. It’s also unfortunately quite common to see major servers from Amazon, on which much of the internet runs, go belly-up themselves these days. Now, obviously most of the internet is set up in a way that there are copies of everything everywhere, redundancy is a must, but every network professional will tell you that there is no absolute redundancy.
The third one is much less technical and probably the easiest to understand. Companies come and go, so do online platforms. In 30 years of internet, we have seen Davids turn into Goliaths, only to be taken down by the next David. Assuming that any of the platforms we write on will be here for years, or decades, is an unwise assumption. These platforms can go out of business overnight and while technically (usually), they owe you the data — your articles — you uploaded, the fine-print in the case of a bankruptcy might not be as straight-forward, and you don’t want your stories to be hostage for months.
The fourth and final one I can think of is somewhat related to the previous one, but it’s not platforms going pear-shaped, but rather a decision to change business model. A company exists to make money, and so do publishing platforms such as Medium or Substack. How they decide to remunerate writers, if at all, is entirely up to them. Just as a paywall model is introduced, it can be removed, either because there’s a new way to generate revenue or because the platform has been acquired by a tech giant that doesn’t need revenue from writers, but rather prefers to use it as an integrated free tool in their other premium products. Happens all the time, and you know it!
The three levels of bad
While the sudden loss of income is frightening to say the least, there’s a lot more to it. It’s actually three levels of bad:
- loss of income — this is immediate and devastating and hurts your bank account instantly,
- loss of content — this is immediate as well, but affects you in the long term, as you suddenly have no way to move your content to an alternative platform,
- loss of investment — immediate but retroactive because suddenly, you find that all the time invested into writing your content, has to be invested again, and chances are that was either huge in the first place or you’re simply unable to write the same articles again because, well, that’s how inspiration works.
The reality is that the value of an article is not just the money it makes over time, but also the time invested into writing it.
Even if you only spent 240 hours on your 100 stories, that is a gigantic investment to lose. At $50/hour, that adds up to $12.000 worth of loss!
Proactive prevention is key
I made the mistake of writing directly on both Quora and Medium for 6 years. While so far, that hasn’t resulted in any tragedy, nor was I ever suspended, I realised this year, I was being an absolute eejit (idiot in Ireland), so I adopted a new process which will ensure that I always have at least not one, but two copies of everything I write!
In an attempt to help with my grammar and language versatility, I initially looked at Grammarly, but as I was doing my research I stumbled upon Ulysses. My problem with Grammarly wasn’t its value, but rather that it felt like using their editor was nothing more than moving all my eggs from one online basket to another, and that was the very thing I was hell-bent on avoiding in the first place. Ulysses allows me to write Markdown, offers stats, a clean interface and checks anything from grammar and spelling to style. It might not be as powerful as Grammarly, but the yearly subscription of $50 feels like good value, especially because I get to have all the text I write offline and also synced up with iCloud. I went even further and ensured that just in case I move away from Ulysses I will still be able to find my markdown files on iCloud and created an external folder, where I simply drag-and-dropped my entire blog folder for instance.
But of course, you don’t have to go for a premium application to ensure you retain ownership of your content no matter what. The same can be done even with Apple’s Notes app, or any other bog-standard text editor on virtually any operating system. The bottom line here is that you create your content offline, create at least one backup, and whatever you post online is nothing but a published copy. Video content creators have been doing this since the dawn of their careers, but that was largely because creating and editing video requires a heavily offline-based process, whereas writing doesn’t — one can simply just type into Medium and call it a day. You’ve now seen, however, it can cost you a lot more than you’re willing to bargain for. Go offline-first, you’ll thank yourself later.
And since we’re on the topic of writing…
Here’s a few more recent stories I wrote, that you might like or feel inspired by. Enjoy! 😉
Did you know that whenever you subscribe to become a Medium Member, us writers, get a cut? You get a ton of great articles, we get a coffee. Sounds like a fair deal to me…
Attila Vago — Software engineer, editor, writer, and occasional music critic. Pragmatic doer, Lego fan, Mac user, cool nerd. JS and Flutter enthusiast. Accessibility advocate.
